At last night's Republican debate, Michele Bachmann tried to stake Tim Pawlenty on his support for cap-and-trade. The EPA wised up and banned DuPont from selling Imprelis, the herbicide that was killing trees. San Francisco could require businesses to let bikers bring their ride inside. Offshore wind turbines could damage whales’ hearing, but a ring of bubbles around the noise pollution could keep whales safe. If you have a ton of old CDs and a yearning for your very own DJ booth, Peter Gabriel has a great recycling idea for you. (Or you could just use them to make an …

Climate change will shift the equation of global power and craziness, and the intelligence community is trying to place for those situations. But Congress isn't interested in that. Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard gives this example: In 2008, [Thomas] Fingar, [former chairman of the National Intelligence Council] now a fellow at Stanford University, took the lead in drafting the first national intelligence assessment on the security challenges presented by climate change. It found that global warming will further destabilize already-volatile parts of the world and should be considered in national security planning. But congressional Republicans dismissed the report as "a waste …

An Energy Department panel wants to require natural gas companies to disclose what chemicals they're using in hydrofracking projects. Green groups have an idea for how to cut the country's debt: stop subsidies to oil and gas companies. But (of course!) most of the members of the Super Congress are opposed to regulating greenhouse-gas emissions. Michelle Bachmann liked the EPA just fine when she was requesting money from it. The Dutch government ran a pilot project that meter private cars and charges drivers based on the miles they rack up. The program basically makes every roll a toll road, but …

As a result of the EPA's new rules mandating lower toxic emissions, coal-fired power plants are closing their doors. The coal industry is complaining that the new rules are too expensive, will hike electricity rates, and cost jobs. The EPA has these facts on its side, though, according to Business Insider: The organization estimates that by 2014, the new legislation will have achieved up to $280 billion in annual health benefits, in addition to preventing up to 34,000 premature deaths, 26,000 hospital and emergency room visits, and 240,000 cases of aggravated asthma. Just think of all the cancer specialists, asthma …

In the aftermath of Fukushima, Japanese people are registering less trust in their government, and stories like this one are the reason why. The entire community of Namie evacuated out of the area surrounding Fukushima to a safe haven, only to find later that they were still in the path of radiation, and the government had tools that indicated as much. When a large plume of something nasty — chemicals, biological hazards, or radiation — is released into the air, it doesn't stay in one place. It's not always obvious where it will go, though. Winds and air pressure systems …

Like the airline industry, the shipping industry objects to the E.U.'s decisions to include it in a emissions trading system. Will the federal government be spending less on disaster response in the future? Somehow “let ‘em drown” doesn’t seem like the best possible debt reduction plan. Australia's carbon tax, which was so hotly disputed that people were sending climate scientists death threats, would apply to just 400 of the country's top polluters. Hydro turbines are going into the Puget Sound by late summer 2013. This coming October, oil will sell for $800 a barrel -- at least in fiction. (Hopefully …

It really sucks to be a lobster fisherperson working in the Long Island Sound. Twelve years ago, 90 percent of the lobsters died off because of pesticides or climate change or both. The ones still there have weird-looking shells, a result of bacteria colonizing the sounds, that keep people from wanting to eat them. Things are so bad some of the lobstermen don't even bother fishing for lobster anymore, says the New York Times: Peter Ringen, 71, with decades of experience in the Sound, has turned to $2-a-pound conch over futile hunts for lobsters. He has about 900 lobster traps. …

Wind turbines are loners. They need to give each other space to be effective. But a new design for wind farms, using a different type of turbines than the giant-fan kind going up all over the place, takes a page from a very social group of animals -- schooling fish -- to create the same amount of energy with shorter turbines, in a smaller area of land. These wind farms use vertical-axis turbines, which are often described as looking like egg-beaters. Like an egg beater's blades, the blades of these turbines move around a vertical pole. (More commonly-used turbines are …

Sometimes even Al Gore can’t resist cursing when he talks about climate skeptics. Listen here. EPA's scientific integrity policy doesn't do a particularly good job at its intended purpose: protecting scientists from political influence. Heavy-duty trucks have to meet fuel efficiency standards too. No word yet on monster trucks. More than 440,000 birds die each year in collisions with wind turbines. "Radical industrialist" and green businessman Ray Anderson died yesterday. Some people out there are so cold-hearted that they would steal ripe tomatoes from community garden plots.

A report from Canada's environmental agency predicts that the rise in greenhouse-gas emissions associated with mining tar-sands oils will be more than double the decrease in the country's emissions from other sources. Environment Canada said in its emissions trends report that the country could avoid 31 megatons in emissions by 2020. Most of those savings come from switching out natural gas for coal in electricity generation. But in that same period, emissions from tar-sands oil could rise by 62 megatons, the report said. By 2020, 12 percent of all of Canada's emissions could come from tar-sands mining. At these rates, …